


Hearthkeeper, or a Gift From Sylaise and a Fire to Light the Way

by Dalektable



Series: Idolatry & the Hearth [2]
Category: Dragon Age (Video Games), Dragon Age - All Media Types, Dragon Age: Inquisition
Genre: Angst, Bittersweet Ending, F/M, Sexual Themes, Stream of Consciousness, Suggestive Themes
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-09-22
Updated: 2017-09-22
Packaged: 2019-01-04 05:17:09
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,043
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12162291
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Dalektable/pseuds/Dalektable
Summary: In which the Inquisitor has made a home out of a lover.





	Hearthkeeper, or a Gift From Sylaise and a Fire to Light the Way

**Author's Note:**

> And this is a companion piece to Idolatry. They can be read in any order, but they are meant to compliment and play off of one another.

With the Dalish, home is meant to be the clan, but Ellana doesn't know that it has ever truly been hers. While her clanmates seem content in one another, she has searched the forests of Thedas for somewhere to put down her roots and _stay. S_ he doesn't know that it should be so bad as the elves of her clan made it sound.

She'd always thought the only thing she would miss would be the open sky above her, and she's not wrong, but there are things about a human home that she doesn't quite know if she likes. The room they give her in Skyhold is too much, too big, too much a prison for her to feel comfortable. The food is too rich, too much. Some nights, in the beginning, she can't keep it down. It's a discomfort, living in a human world, that crawls beneath her skin and lives like a second being all its own.

She finds that comfort elsewhere, keening to the heavens with the Commander's mouth between her thighs. He doesn't mind when she calls out to the Creators, hand in his hair, leaning back on her wrist against the bed, ankles locked around his neck, as he kneels on the floor.

 _Never fix your roof,_ she tells him when she's sobered up from the high of orgasm, and he chuckles and licks the insides of her thighs clean. The way he holds her is sometimes too gentle, reverent, and she wonders at the look in his eyes when he lifts himself up to kiss her like he doesn't belong here. He looks at her like she will slip between his fingers and float into the sky through the hole in the ceiling, and she grasps onto his upper arms to show him she's here, she's real, she's tethered. He is a stone foundation, and she is the wooden roof, leading way to the night sky.

When she wanders too far from home, he reigns her back in and pulls her to Skyhold. She hears the beat of her heart like _Cul-len, Cul-len, Cul-len._ It's a war drum and he is her war monger; together they bathe in the blood and violence and chaos of their world, weary and tired. It cannot last, they know, it cannot last. Peace will come some day.

The Dalish have always been about permanence among the inevitability that permanence doesn't exist. A home is temporary, knowledge is lost, and they live in cycles upon cycles upon cycles, and Ellana's _dizzy,_ and she wants to get off the ride.

There's always another war council, another battle, another mission to be completed. There is always another night for them to come together, nearly lost between weeks where she is gone. It's most obscene those nights when they are too breathless to even speak, or too busy putting their mouths to other uses, because she cannot switch off between Inquisitor and Ellana. Those nights, when she does let out a sigh, it is sometimes not his name, but his title. _Commander,_ she'll say. _Inquisitor,_ he'll return, kissing along her stomach, or her neck, or her thighs, like placing markers in a map, capturing her lips like an enemy hold. Then she moans like a war cry, and therein lies the obscenity: that this might be another part of their jobs, and they're just taking their work home.

Too much, she thinks, it's too much, whether overwhelmingly intense and urgent, or soft, lazy. He fills her with too much longing; she wants to surge against him and pull him against her until they're so connected she doesn't know where they are, and she's an agoraphobic mess who never wants to leave.

And at night, he burns like a hearth against her. _How are you always so warm?_ she asks him, and he doesn't give an answer, just gives her another searing kiss. He keeps her warm in the winter months, in the cool air of the mountains, even with the hole in his roof. Isn't that what a home is supposed to do: keep you warm, keep you safe?

She feels that way with his arms around her at night, in those stolen moments between missives and war room councils. And to think that a few years ago she never would have considered him for his humanity. He is, after all, everything she should never have wanted: an Andrastian, a human, a Templar. He shouldn't make her feel safe; he shouldn't feel more like home than her clan ever did. But when she crosses the threshold of his office and finds herself with his arms surrounding her like the four walls she never had growing up, she's happy. She loves it, she loves him, she knows, and she tells him in quiet whispers against the curved shell of his ear, murmurs against the skin of his neck. She has been blessed by Sylaise to have found him, to know this warmth as she does.

And she loves the sound of her name in her ear as he pants above her: _Ellana, Ellana, Ellana._ It's poetry in a chant, devotion and dedication. Is this what he thinks of her, she wonders, that she is a goddess wrapped in flesh? He makes love to her like a prayer, anyway. Heathen that she is, she thinks he is a god in his own right, golden and shining.

She wraps her legs around him, never wants to let him go. It has taken them each nearly three decades to find each other, and she will have her fill.

In the afterglow, she looks at him like he's a hero carved into stone and he whispers against her skin.

_I've never had a cause like this before. All my life has been leading to this._

She doesn't know whether he means her or the Inquisition. She wants to think he means her, that she has become his goddess warrior as much as he has become her warrior god. She touches his cheek and kisses him, wanting to bite his lips and his neck and suck bruises into his skin, claim him as her home.

 _I love you,_ she says.

 _There's a difference between love and longing,_ he tells her.

 

**Author's Note:**

> Comment, please, it makes my day, whether you have criticism or praise!


End file.
